31 minute read
Pat George (by Barrie & David
by NBAA
PAT GEORGE
April 1930 by her sons BARRIE & DAVID
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SuAndi: There are two voices in this interview, Barrie’s and David’s. Despite the age gap of over thirteen years, they agree life hadn’t changed that much in the family; it was always the same standards.
Barrie: Mum did all sorts of jobs; she cleaned, she was an auxiliary at the hospital, she worked in care homes. I can’t ever remember her not working.
She was the strong one in the relationship, what she said went, ‘if we are having that - we are having that, if it’s no, it’s no’ and that’s the end of it. There was no in between, there were no grey areas. He came straight home, there was no pub after work. Mum was the dominant one, whatever she said went – my Dad would always say ‘yeah’.
She gave him his bus fares and his money for the bookies1. We thought he was soft, but he wasn’t. He was strong, because his strength was in saying ‘you run the house, I go to work and you run the house’. Someone in her family had been a housekeeper. So, she was quite big on etiquette showing us how to use the right knives and forks and spoons.
We had to practise saying ‘How now, brown cow’, you know (laughter).
Mum gave us the grounding for impeccable manners and to be confident anywhere knowing what cutlery to use. If it had been left to Dad, we would be using our fingers.
David: I think there are similarities of Mum and Dad growing up when they were younger. They both suffered physical abuse.
I will start with my Dad, Sammy George, and then try and link that into my Mum. From what I understand, as a child in Africa, Dad and his mother lived in the village, then his Mum met a ‘friend’ as they called it, and they moved to another village. This ‘friend’ was polygamist2 with other children and the eldest brother of his first wife’s didn’t like our Dad because he was also the firstborn son. This caused resentment resulting in Dad being abused by the brother. Dad in retaliation became a bit of a rebel while carrying his younger brother around to protect him. Eventually Dad had to return to his birth village.
I’m not a hundred percent sure of this, I got this from my sister Christine, maybe our Ann (Sarge), might be able confirm it.
From what I understand Mum was treated badly by her Mum and possibly her Aunt. Gran had a sister who lived in Shropshire who couldn’t have children, so my Mum was given to her. Then the Aunt got pregnant and sent Mum back. But Gran didn’t want Mum and that was it. She was sort of left to fend for herself from twelve to fourteen and she had periods of homelessness. At one stage Mum lived in a big house in Didsbury. She always talked about that, there was a tennis court in the back garden.
Definitely she had a difficult childhood, but you wouldn’t know it. Mum and Dad ended up in the centre of Moss Side in Manchester. Maybe they were both looking to get away from their pasts (to build a new life).
Barrie: Gran was a hypocrite the way she reacted to Dad because she married a Chinese man. I was about five when Dad left the sea. Something went on. I suspect it was an argument about my parents causing Gran to disown my Mum, her daughter. So, we never saw our Gran, I never saw her.
David: I’ve always liked to think that they discussed and agreed that the kids would always come first. I don’t think they ever discussed their pasts.
I didn’t know about my Mum’s past until we met Uncle Brian and I didn’t know about my Dad’s until I went to Nigeria. It was then I thought about the similarities of rejection they endured; they were virtually orphans. I think that helped keep them together. They knew having gone through a lot themselves how harsh childhood can be, and they wanted to protect their children from anything similar.
She would dish out the physical punishment, the slaps, not Dad. Dad had two ways to punish. One was the one finger, one leg position. This meant standing on one leg with your body bent towards the floor using one finger to keep you balanced from falling over. Or he would lecture you, that was his biggest one, lecturing (laughter). We would be sat there thinking ‘just give me a crack3’ (laughter). Mum would say ‘Well, you know you asked for it’ and let him do his thing.
Dad always said, ‘My hands are too big to hit them’, so my Mum was the one who would give us a crack saying to Dad ‘He deserves a crack – I’ll punish him’. He was a strong man; I have seen him lose his temper. I’ve seen him have a go at full grown fellows twice the size of him and really there was no coming back from it. But for us, his children it wasn’t ever going to happen.
2 A person who has more than one wife or husband at the same time. 3 A slap
Barrie: She was always moody in the morning – When I was about eight (David wasn’t even born then) we were living in a two up two down in Lamb Street, Ardwick. I had come down the stairs when Mum asked me, ‘Have you washed behind your ears’, so I said ‘Yeah’. She looked behind my ears, got the teapot and turned it upside down over my head. Now I am covered in tealeaves. She said, ‘Now you’ve got to wash behind your ears, haven’t you?’
David: Because our brother Mike, was going to work he had three Weetabix. I am the youngest and still going to school, so I only got two. It was a daily argument.
On this one morning he left me just the one Weetabix, so we had a bit of a barney. Afterwards I’m stood cleaning my teeth in the bathroom; it was barely four feet wide. Mum comes in and my head hit every wall in the bathroom (laughter), bang, bang, bang, bang. ‘Don’t you bloody back chat me first thing in the morning’.
We were living in a flat then and I had a friend who lived upstairs, and we’d walk to school together. He was waiting at the door but ran off when he heard the racket. At school he asks me if I am alright, I said ‘Yeah, why, what’s the matter?’ ‘I heard your Mum shouting’. ‘That’s just normal mate, that’s just normal’ I told him. I just copped for it4 that morning. When I got back from school it wasn’t mentioned. She never held a grudge, it was just how it was. Mum had to have a cigarette and a drink of tea, a proper drink of tea, before anyone could speak to her. You just didn’t speak in the morning, just kept to yourself. If you did speak her response would be ‘Oh no, now is not the time’. She believed in a short sharp shock with anything that was (always) on hand. But other than that, she was very calm really, very easy going, always got on with people. She was placid amongst other people right, but a firebrand in the house. If anyone, our Mike got the affection, because he was that type, everyone loved Mike. Barrie was Aunt Peg’s favourite. But, hugging and showing affection? No, I don’t think it was the done thing in them days.
Barrie: She had a funny side as well. Mum worked as a cleaner for the big houses on Hyde Road. I remember once when I was left to look after our Christine and our Mike and gave them both a haircut. It was a mess. I thought ‘I’m going to get murdered here!’, but she just burst out laughing. ‘What did I do to make you the barber?’
Dad was away at sea, so for the first five years of my life and our Christine’s, Mum was like a single parent. We lived in rooms. Mum’s sister, my Aunt Peg5, lived above us. They would take turns in looking after us when they went out to work but sometimes we had to look after ourselves. I remember when I nearly burnt the house down. She had left me in charge of our Christine and Mike. I was making fried bread when the frying pan caught on fire. I’ve stuck the pan under the tap and the flames shot up, caught the curtains and I have burns on both my hands.
I ran out the door, jumped over the fence and run to my Mum shouting ‘the house is on fire’. Mum was working at the Norman’s Hotel on Hyde Road where truck drivers stayed overnight. She has to run back from where the Apollo is up to Shakespeare Street, (no one had a telephone in the house). Fortunately, I think a neighbour had pulled the curtains down, which meant the house hadn’t caught ablaze. She never chastised me, just wrapped my hands in bandages and took me to the MRI. ‘I bet you don’t make fried bread again’, she said. And that was it.
4 David got the slap instead of his brother 5 Ann Sarge’s mother
Dad was away at sea for so long. He was in Canada when I was born. I must have been about two or three months when he came home, to see this ‘white kid’. His friends said, ‘She must have been unfaithful’. Dad said ‘No, she’s not’. He took me round to all his friends and said, ‘now then’. They had to say, ‘He is the spit of you’.
David: Mum was tall, slim, blond and always well dressed. She always carried herself well too. People would look at a white woman with a Black man as being cheap and easy and it wasn’t the case. Yes, there were working mums6 they had to put food on the table. There were alcoholic mums; who knows what drove them to alcohol. Was it the abuse they suffered from being in the relationship, was it that that drove them to drink? Was it their different cultures that put pressure on the relationship? We know families with African fathers and English mothers where the African side dominates. Not with our parents they managed it together, but we do know that it went on.
So, people’s perceptions and reaction of white mothers in the sixties, fifties and early seventies was to look down on them.
In the late forties, early fifties especially, white people used to think that a white woman with a Black man was a prostitute, full stop. It was far from the case. Of course, there were prostitutes. People had to put bread on the table, there was no such thing as the National Health then and DHSS, so everyone had to do what they had to do, to put food on the table. We were fortunate that our parents were grafters as was Aunt Peg. So, we were lucky really or just fortunate.
Barrie: I remember going to a friend’s house after school and he asked his Mum where she was going to which she replied, ‘I’m going out with a Black man’. I looked at her with a shocked expression of ‘excuse me’. She got all apologetic saying, ‘Oh I didn’t mean that’, but she meant it because what she was really saying was being with a Black man meant ‘I’m going for a good time’.
A lot of people thought women like our mum were just good time girls. In reality in the fifties and sixties, they were only girls, but they were girls raising families, while their husbands were away at sea or in the army or in the air force. It was difficult at times especially between the late twenties and post war because there was an influx of Africans coming over on ships. The women had gone through the war years as children, so they had all that trauma. Then they meet the fellow who they fall in love with, who happens to be Black, then they have to face bigotry. So yes, strong women, very strong women. Our Mum had the three of us by 1956/57, right through the sixties, she is bringing up children. She would have been about seventeen, eighteen when she had Barrie in 1949. So, she had no life.
Mum had one Auntie who was well off - had the tenners7 in the bank, lived in Didsbury! I am not sure how positive or supportive she was to Aunt Peg and Mum marrying Black men. We always had the impression from Mum, that she never lived up to their expectations, but we can’t honestly say.
David: When I was growing up at sixteen, seventeen, I don’t think that perception about white women had changed then from ‘what all they are good for is sex’. You would hear comments from white lads and think ‘that’s a bit out of order’.
I remember starting at the airport and working with guys there and they would make comments. I would turn around and say, ‘Well I am coming to take you daughter out tonight, how are you going to like that?’ So, it was still there in the eighties.
6 Prostitutes 7 Ten pounds
Barrie: I remember going to town once with my Mum and our Christine in the trolley. I think we were going to Lewis’s, around that area and Mum was spat at. Dad wasn’t with us, just our Christine and me. She just carried on walking.
In Wythenshawe, the bigotry was less obvious because Mum worked at Wythenshawe hospital and Dad worked at the Gas Works. So, people didn’t see them that much, mainly walking to and from the bus stop. They didn’t have any friends when they moved so no real socialising. I think Mum just got on with it; went to work and ignored them but could sense some people talked about her behind her back.
The Black people no matter where they came from, all liked Dad, and accepted Mum with him. A lot of the Jamaican women got on quite well with Mum too. But there was always a bit of an overtone from other white women for being a white woman with a Black man; there was a bit of that, particularly on our street.
Barrie: Mum always said that she ‘rued the day’ we moved from Ardwick, because until then I just got into little scrapes, scuffles and fights, as you do as a kid. On the first day in school in Wythenshawe somebody tried to put my head down the toilet. I battered him and got ‘the strap’ . After that came the name calling ‘liquorice all sort’ and all that.
I wanted to make them more frightened of me than I was of them, plus I had in the back of my mind, our Christine and Michael coming behind me, (David wasn’t born then in 62) so I fought them back. I genuinely thought that she felt she had made a mistake with Wythenshawe. It was better for them, but I never really found my footing. I made friends after a while, but I think it was I was tested. Once I had beaten them, I became more accepted.
David: When I was a kid, things did change. Mum would sort of counsel neighbours, and I know when my Dad left the ships people would seek his advice. He told me he knew Bassey, (Shirley Bassey’s Dad) and all the things that Bassey went though. People would come and offload their problems, probably because they saw our parents as a tight unit.
Mum accepted Dad’s African customs while keeping her own English ways. It was a bit like living in two different worlds. You would sit with Dad and it would be all African, with Mum it was all English. Mum and Dad’s food was a big part of our lives.
The only day we got a cooked breakfast was on a Sunday, the other days it was porridge. Mum would cook a full Sunday breakfast and you’d wake up to the smell of eggs and bacon floating up the stairs. Dad was ‘famous’ for his breakfasts, everybody loved it. So even after we all left home we would always make sure we got there for breakfast.
Mum would cook a Sunday dinner, then we would all sit and wait for my Dad to cook his food – coz that was like our supper (laugher). We had the best of both worlds, we had the English food, we had the African food; we had the African upbringing, we had the English upbringing. Together they were just rock solid.
Barrie: Before we had televisions, I would sit down with Mum as she did the crossword. ‘Barrie here is a clue, tell me what it is’. I must have been about ten. She believed in education.
Any brains we have, come from. She wanted us to understand where we were from. Most likely she and Dad had talked about the benefits if we went to Nigeria. She was always aware of how we were as kids
being brought up in an England while being half Nigerian. It is important to share the fact that she was aware of that and encouraged us to know our African heritage. When Margaret Thatcher brought in British nationality law, Mum was furious. She more or less said, ‘Your Dad has worked all his life for England’. She was always aware of what was going on in the world, she was pretty politically astute.
David: I came home once wearing a Krugerrand. Mum wanted to know why I was wearing it. For me it was flashy. Then she asked me if I knew the significance behind it. She always tried to educate me. Barrie. As a way of getting the kids on a holiday that parents couldn’t afford, they were sent to Dr? in Conway. It was for the six weeks school holiday. We used to call it ‘convalescence’. Christine and Barrie went twice, and Anne Sarge went once. Parents could visit once a month or once over the six weeks. Mum and Aunt Peg made the trek (remember it was steam engines in the fifties) Manchester to Conway, and then back home again! Mum was always upset when the visit was over. The last time, I had caught an illness and she had to leave me taking Christine and Mike home. I remember being sat at the window crying, and even though I went home two weeks later, for her to look back and see me crying at the window must have been hard.
Dad would stay at home and once he tried to decorate. When we walked in the house he had put the wallpaper up at an angle, so she never asked him again!! I learned that quick from my Dad ‘do it wrong and I won’t ask you again’! David always says he wasn’t spoilt but he was, he was taken on holiday to Cornwall. Devon was one of them wasn’t it, and the Isle of Wight.
Barrie left home at sixteen, so only knew Dave as a baby. He would return at weekends. Christine left when she had her own family and then Michael, leaving the fourteen-year-old Dave home alone. As the only child they could spend a bit more money on him and give him the things they may have given their older children but couldn’t afford at the time.
Barrie: He was spoilt. He would regularly get new shoes, new trousers. We would get them at Whit week,
David: They say I was, but I don’t necessarily think I was. I couldn’t get away with anything me because they had seen it all with my elder brothers. I could push it a bit more really and I didn’t get as disciplined. I think my Dad had mellowed a bit, but I still felt the wrath of my Mum if I did push it. OK I was a bit spoilt! Yeah.
Barrie: I never had any disagreements with my Mum. I would rant and rave and be the awkward teenager, but she would just laugh at me, kind of thing, we never clashed over anything. So, it was never a case of ‘I’m leaving home and I am never going to speak to you again’, because there was no reason to. The only thing my Mum ever said was, ‘I don’t want to find you dead in a gutter because that is where you are going to finish up’.
This one time there were a few of us in Painswick Park Wythenshawe (this was before they built the lake where I learnt to fish). We had ‘acquired’ some drink, bottles of champagne. Mum was walking through and I said to her ‘Mum do you want a drink of champagne?’ and she said, ‘I’ll see you when you get home, our Barrie’, (laughter) and carried on walking.
The only time I had an argument with my Dad, I was fifteen thinking ‘I’m a big man’. I had come home about eleven o’clock and his rule was that I was in for ten o’clock. So, it was ‘booff’, a brush in my eye. He said, ‘You bloody won’t do that again’ and gone out. Mum said, ‘You had better go and
get him because he has said bloody, so he is mad at you’. ‘Bloody’ was the strongest word my Dad ever used, so I had to follow him, and apologise for upsetting him so much that he hit me with a brush. I lost my temper once with my youngest Whitney when she was a young woman and we fell out. Later she said, ‘You went all African on me and you started talking like that, ‘I am your Fadder’’. I didn’t know how it happened, it had just come out. I now find as I’ve got older that I have turned in to my Dad.
I remember Dad coming to court once and standing up for me. You know how Africans are ‘he’s really a good boy’. I got bail and we drove back home together, but he never said a word. When we got home, he told me, ‘You are at a point in your life when you are at a crossroads of choices; good or bad’. Me being me, I didn’t listen - you never listen to your parents, do you? I wish I had done sometimes now, but you don’t, right? I finished up going to jail. My Dad never visited but he never held it against me when I was released and got back home.
We got a knock on the door one day and I was in the kitchen. It was the murder squad asking if I was home. Mum came through so white and she was shaking. I thought ‘I can’t put her through this’, and I left the next day. Off course I hadn’t murdered anyone. The suspect had got out of a taxi in Wythenshawe and given their name as Harry or Barrie. So, the police had come straight to my Mum’s.
I actually saw my mother visibly shaking and that had upset me. When you are ‘up to no good’ you don’t think about any repercussions until it is in your face. Now I knew she was frightened and terrified. Ours was a fairly happy home. Sunday’s Dad would go and get a load of drink and invite the neighbours in. Over time Barrie, our sister Christine then Mike our brother got engaged. Cousin Anne would come most weekends because she loved coming because there was always something going on. It was as though the family was the centre of attention. Mike would bring his mates to sleep over as did Barrie. Many mornings there would be bodies crashed out all over the bed. Everybody was welcome, there was no sort of discrimination or anything, everyone was welcome.
Occasionally they would go out, possibly to the Reno or to the Dogs8. This particular time, they were going to the dogs. Dad dressed up and Mum put on a dog tooth check coat and put her hair up and that and I just thought of like ’wow, flipping heck’, they looked really good, as a couple.
Barrie. Mum was always concerned about how we looked. In the mid-sixties I had been down Moss Side to buy some weed. I was walking down Princess Road when unbeknown to me, Mum and Christine ride pass on the bus and she says, ‘There’s our Barrie’. Mum said, ‘Don’t look at him, he will only look up and wave’. Chris asks why, and mum replied ‘Have you seen what he has got on? Just look away’’ (laughter). I had chessboard draught hipsters on, brown and white with a white belt, I always remembered that, and we often laugh about it.
Mum started to suffer from some health problems. At first it was just overheard talk. She wanted to enjoy a bit of life and went away with a couple of friends, with Margaret, Mark’s wife’s Mum. She wanted to try new things, live a bigger life.
Because she had worked in the hospitals she knew what was going on. She must have thought ‘I’m too young for this. I still want to enjoy my life’ It was a difficult period for her because she began to struggle.
David: I had no responsibilities so, I was free to focus on my Mum with only me and my Dad at home.
Barrie, Mark and Chris, they had their own families. It was left to Dad and me care for her. People tried to tell me that things were pretty difficult, but I wasn’t accepting that. I just thought things would be alright. I didn’t know what it was all about, to be honest with you. Then it started to become known that she wasn’t too well. Christine lived nearby and would pop in and out and doing a bit. Towards the end everybody mucked in.
Barrie: It was breast cancer. She had a Mastectomy9 so I thought ‘great – everything’s great’ and she did well for a good five years or so. Then it went to her bones and that is when she started to deteriorate – but it didn’t stop her doing anything in the early days.
I took her to Christies for her Chemo about twelve months before she passed. Do you remember how you used to buy videos off the street? She said, ‘Can you get me a couple of videos Barrie?’ so I said ‘Yeah’. I got her ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. The following day she said, ‘What was that bloody video you got me?’ (laughter). I didn’t know what she meant because I hadn’t seen it. Then I had to go away to serve an eighteen month’s sentence.
David: I did get away with quite a bit in terms of getting in to mischief, but I was never looking at any prison time. I have got a criminal record for shop lifting, nicking a bike, petty things. To be perfectly honest I knew my Mum wasn’t well and I didn’t want to put her through it because I thought she’s not well enough to cope. That kept me on the rails a bit really, coz I thought I can’t be getting in to trouble because she is not well I had a bit of kudos so to speak because our Barrie paved the way. Somebody would go ‘Are you Barrie’s brother?’ ‘Yeah, yeah’, ‘Ok’ and that was it. I managed to keep out of lumber a couple of times
Barrie: Mum showed her strength again because she wouldn’t go into hospital for palliative care. She lived each day and she didn’t want to go into a hospice. They tried giving her drugs but towards the end she became housebound and bedridden. It was a case of continued palliative care. Nobody knew when the end was going to come. You just got on with it, do you know what I mean, you just kind of got on with it and it just became part of your day.
David: I was mostly ignorant to be honest. I didn’t know anything about the prognosis, and what the eventual outcome was. I think they kept it away from me and anyway at the age I was, I would have been in denial. So, it did come as a shock. I was like ‘bloody hell, right’. You have to adjust, try to just get on really.
Dad was still working at sixty-two. He was ten years older than Mum when she died at 52 years young on the 12th December 1982. To lose someone after all those years and all they had been through did affect him a lot. He was devastated, ‘What am I going to do now, what are we going to do?’ You could see the loss; he would talk to other people to Aunt Peg, because they shared Mum, but he never burdened his children.
Barrie: I remember the cell door opening when the priest walked in. I said, ‘It’s me Mum’.
David: Because Dad wasn’t in a fit state, we had to arrange the funeral. He didn’t know what he had to do really. We did talk about the arrangements. She was a big Jim Reeves fan, so he was happy for that music to be played.
He really did need someone to walk with him. It was Christine who walked with him throughout the funeral. It was the only time we ever saw Dad cry. Dad was a strong character a little fellow, but strong.
Barrie: I got to go to the funeral, and I was cuffed-up 10. I said to the screw ‘look right, it’s my family.’ They were good, they took the cuffs off and let me mingle with everyone. Dad was at a loss, definitely at a loss. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He had relied on Mum to run the house, pay the bills, everything, because he didn’t read.
David: I wasn’t particularly going anywhere, so I was happy to stay at home and try and do what my Mum would have done and manage his money. It wasn’t a big deal for me. But when she had passed I went off the rails a bit. I hated school and once I had left I just wanted to go to town, big lights and go out with my friends. I always felt that I had missed out because there had always been stories of ‘the good old days’ from when the family lived in Ardwick. There were Italian families and other Mixed Race families for an inclusiveness, I didn’t feel that in Wythenshawe. Probably because when we came to Wythenshawe, we were the only half caste family. And then a lot of the Jamaicans came, but for me it was trying to fit in, who do I hang with and everything else.
I have got to get this in; There is a picture of Barrie, Christine, Mike and Ann with Aunt Peg and Mum in the park. Even though I may have had holidays, they had the happier times because they were all happy together.
I was growing up in the early seventies, I started to be a bit more aware of my culture, influenced by my elder brother wanting to go and join the Biafran war. My cousin Ann looking similar to Angela Davis . Plus, it was my mum because she was knowledgeable what went on in the world who had first guided me. It was around the same time I was looking at going to Nigeria, so that kind of helped Dad to stay focused.
Barrie: Mum always used to say, ‘Our Baz, I wish he would settle down’. She wrote me a letter to read after she had died and the gist of it was that one day, I would settle down and she would be happy. That was her dying wish, to see me settled. I promised myself that on my release I was going straight to the crem11, which I did. Brian Sarge picked me up from Preston and I went straight there. I have to live with the knowledge that I was in prison when she died, when I should have been there for her. Of course, with hindsight you know better, don’t you?
Maybe I could have been a better son, I don’t know, but I am what I am, and I can’t change that, and I can’t turn the clock back.
David: I think we all could have been better.
Barrie: Hers was the first big death in our family really. We used to go every Sunday put our flowers for her. Dad felt that he needed to go and every Sunday, he would wait for David or Chris to take him up, and if we couldn’t, it would be like ‘what are you playing at?’
Every Sunday it was religious. He wouldn’t say anything out loud. We would give him time to attend the grave and do what he wanted to do –then we would come away and be back as normal. He went for about three or four years, every Sunday.
He was still going when Barrie came out of prison and started taking him. Outwardly he didn’t change, but inwardly he was heartbroken. His routine was always the same he would get up in the morning, go
10 Handcuffed 11 Crematorium
in to the bathroom, clean his teeth then dress for his day.
On the 18th November 1997 when Dad passed, David opened the wardrobe and all Mum’s clothes were there; he hadn’t parted with anything.
David: The sad part was when in seeing the medical stuff like her wigs, that brought back the sad memories.
Some of the clothes could pinpoint to certain times like the seventies, when they were all very floral and big. In my head I would go ‘oh - I can remember my Mum wearing that at such and such a time’. Like the dog tooth coat, I could remember that – bang, you know, so they did evoke more happy memories and that is what I sort of stuck with.
At the time mum passed I needed her guidance because she had seen it all and done it all and would have advised me better. I felt I went off the rails and I needed her to keep me from making some crazy decisions, because I have made some stupid decisions.
I work for a care leavers organisation. Because she would have had a better understanding of the type of work that I do, she would have stopped me, ‘because you don’t know enough about it’. I can’t blame her for passing away and I am not looking to do that, but I’ll always miss the guidance. It wouldn’t be an in-depth conversation, but a case of making me see sense.
Growing up in Wythenshawe, the first school I went to there was me and another half caste girl. Straight away I knew the difference and it was like ‘where do I fit in here?’ I have got a British passport, I was born and brought up in Britain. So, I am British, however nobody can ever take away my Nigerian heritage. I wanted to know about my Dad’s culture, I have to uphold that. It was my Mum who encouraged me to understand my heritage and she would have been proud of me for that. She would have been proud that I went to Nigeria and proud of my daughter.
I think it was her pushing that has helped me keep going really. Some of the things that she would say like ‘, OK so it is a bit tough, well tough luck, get on with it’. They are the sort of things that you use to keep you going in life really, don’t they, do you know what I mean. I have tried to pass these on to my daughter, but I don’t know if I have been successful.
Barrie: I have got my mum’s colouring and my Dad’s physicality. My Mum she would be over the moon about her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She did meet Barrie, Danielle, Yvonne and Vincent, sadly not the others. Of course, if my Dad were alive, we would still be going every Sunday. Replying to the letter she left me when she died, I would say ‘well I am there now, really, I am there now, be happy’. It took a while, but I believe that I got there, and she is happy now.
All we can really say is thanks to our Mum and Dad for being two incredibly strong people, incredibly strong and to give our love to Christine.
